 Hey folks, Circuit Python Day is August 6th, 2021, and it's the snakeiest day of the year. This day highlights all things Circuit Python and Python on hardware. Tag your projects on social media to have them showcased on Circuit Python Day. Circuit Python is an easy-to-use programming language for microcontrollers. You can install Circuit Python on a lot of different boards from A to Fruit and the community. The libraries and code live on the board, so it's way more accessible. The board shows up like a USB drive, so you can just drag and drop a UF2 file. It automatically installs the firmware, so it's really easy to upgrade to future releases. This makes iteration much faster, so you don't have to compile your code like in Arduino. It works like a USB storage device, so you can drag and drop files right on the drive. BundleFly will grab all of the code and libraries, but also any project files like fonts and images. All of the files are bundled in a single zip, so you'll have everything you need to run the code. We think this makes maintaining code much better and it's just awesome for beginners. For all things Circuit Python related, check out the links in the awesome list. You can listen to podcasts, chat on the Discord server, and subscribe to the newsletter. So go to CircuitPython.org and get your projects up and running. We made it a company holiday. Yeah. But we're here at the Adafoot factory. We're celebrating our third Circuit Python day, the snakeiest day of the year. It's cool. It's always been a remote-only event. Well, we did in-person events one of the first years. Last two years, obviously not. Yeah. What we decided to do as well, we could try to do something in-person, but it would be pretty tough because there's a lot of uncertainties, especially even right now. And so he said, well, let's continue to do what we've always really been able to do, which is online shows, online content, and virtual, so you can watch it anytime. And this one, we wanted to do this style of video for a while, and we're calling it the board tour. Board tour. Well, you're not going to be bored. Not going to be bored. Yeah. You're not boring into rock. And it's about boards. The reason why we're doing a board tour is we get asked this a lot, and I have good news and bad news. Good news, you're going to get a board tour from Lady Aida and talk about a lot of Circuit Python boards. Bad news, or just other news, is we'll never be able to do a comprehensive guide that's up to date, that covers everything we'd want to. Because there's so many boards. That would cover our stuff. And I wouldn't feel right unless we said, well, there's other boards besides Aida for you. That said, did you get to make, have a great board comparison? Let's start with, let's start with that, because I want to give shout out tonight. I used to work at Make, so I think. Okay. So check this. So this right now is magazine.com forward slash comparison forward slash boards. And this is the best board guide available right now. You can type Aida fruit and you can see a lot of boards. It doesn't have the most recent latest thing, but it has everything up until like September of 2020. And that's, we, we make quite a bit of boards. So if you wanted to go in, and let's say, so I had the filter for Aida fruit, but let's say if you just wanted to see Spark fun boards, Spark fun, their board support Circuit Python, at least some of them do, and you'll be able to see a spark dash fund, so you can see their other boards and they've moved towards the thing plus form factor and micromon. And micromon. Yeah. So depending on, you know, which one you choose, you'll be able to run a version of Python or specifically Circuit Python. And I saw in their forums that folks wanted to get Circuit Python on their micromod and now they have a VADPAD, which allows you to name it so computers recognize it and all that stuff. So this is all good news. So I, I really want to stress one thing because I don't think anyone else talks like that. So one of the reasons we're never going to do a board guide because I would say we should cover all the boards that Aida fruit doesn't make to yes. And that just means it's now it's now thousands and thousands of boards every year. It'll never be independent group like make and dig a key who, you know, they don't make. Yeah, I know for a fact we're not going to have every board for everyone. And as we talk about the board tour, most of the boards, in fact, the most popular board that runs Circuit Python is not for me to fruit. So our board guide, the board tour is going to be specifically for boards that we know that work with Circuit Python, but just so I can send a link to folks in the future. It's like we'll, we'll never be able to do a better job than what makes doing with this. So I'd rather just help make sport, make work with dig a key and whoever is doing the biggest, most comprehensive board guide, let's have them do that. So everything's in there. Anytime you see a board guide from a company, they're just going to put their own things in it. And Circuit Python is a different thing than Adafruit. And so we can, we have lots of different boards, but this is solely focused on Circuit Python boards. But for all boards and you care thing, like if you want to just sort by clock speed or if it has ethernet, like make has a good, good resource for that. So check that out too. Yeah. Adding to that, if you get the make guide to boards, the 2020 board guide with dig a key has this like AR thing. So when you look at the magazine or when you look at the like PDF or whatever, or you can just download the app, you can look at the boards and AR augmented reality. It's cool because you can see it in like physical, how big it is, how it looks like this around. And we're going to we'll answer any questions as we go through this with the with boards. But I wanted to give everyone like here's where we're starting. So go to circuitpython.org. And this is your first stop, pretty much anything you want to do or know about, or if anyone has any questions about it, or how it's related to micro Python, everything is on here on on this page. And so sometimes folks ask questions like it's all right there, it's all right there, it's all right there. But this is the first stop, circuitpython.org. Next up, let's go to the downloads. And this is what I was saying before. It's unusual, I think, for an entity to embrace all of the possibilities. So the number one board that runs circuitpython right now, it's Pico. Yeah, this is sorted by downloads, although I will say we can do it. We can do it other ways, too. It isn't all the downloads, especially when we just have a new release, it'll be a little bit, you know, not organized until we, you know, because it takes a while to get all that download data and parse it. But it is a rough estimate of the number of downloads, which is a proxy for us of popularity. And the Pico is an incredibly popular board from Raspberry Pi. I actually think the Pico is a particularly interesting board and chips at the RP2040, and the Pico is a dev board for it, because, you know, I don't have any personal insight into the inner workings of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, or, you know, development group, but it really felt like they designed this chip specifically to run Python on hardware. Like this was this is a chip that when I look at it, I'm like, wow, this was this is, you know, extremely high RAM, you know, the dual core, the PIO, you know, peripheral. This is really a great, you know, built-in UF2 bootloader. This is great for running and installing circuitpython or micropython, you know, which is that their official distribution for Python hardware. And so I think I think it's interesting that we've moved from, you know, here's a board that's like, you know, we've made boards and some of them are designed for circuitpython or they're boards designed for micropython, you know, because we have external flash memory on them or like a neopixel indicator. But this is really neat because this is the first chip silicon hardware that is designed with running Python on a hardware in mind. And this is a big twist in how you think about hardware and the software that runs on hardware because, you know, oftentimes, silicon developers will design hardware specifically for running Linux. That's not unusual. They're like, what are the, what are the requirements I'm going to need to be able to run Linux on this? And obviously they think a lot about, you know, running C-compiled program, how does GCC compile for this chip and kind of optimizing the caches and, you know, the memory layouts and stuff so that C-compiler works well with it and it's neat that this is now designed specifically for Python on hardware and other interpreted languages. So very, very interesting, right? It's taking a while for Python on hardware to become popular, but it's quite a sign for me to see this and hopefully other chip makers will take advantage of seeing the popularity of the RP2040 and make more chips with a large amount of RAM. That's the thing that really helps a board be good. RAM and USB, right? Well, native USB, honestly, almost every chip has native USB, thankfully. Although I wish they would add support to TUNI USB for us. I think it would be cool if they did the pull request to add that support. But the built-in USB boot loader and, you know, 264K of RAM, I mean, I love it. I'm getting all fluffy. OK, so that's the most when we have the next version, the download count will get updated. But that's the that's the most downloads of Circuit Python for the board right now. Yeah. OK, great. Number one. So I want to go through just the top ones and maybe we can talk about them as a group. And then what I want to also do is so folks are like, oh, I wish I had a filter based on like features or like whatever. You just have to click filters. So you can always do that. Like if you're like, I really want Wi-Fi, you can go and click Wi-Fi. And, you know, then you're then you're looking at boards with just Wi-Fi. Yeah. And again, like not necessarily just from Adafruit, in fact, in the top three. Only ones from Adafruit. So let's now go to Circuit Playground Express. The original, I'd say. This is the first board that was designed specifically again when the chip wasn't designed for Circuit Python, but the board was. And the real thing that made a difference was the inclusion of that on board flash chip. I got to give a shout out to Scott Tanute. We were thinking like, how are we going to add more storage so we could store like, you know, files and and any assets for programming. And I think he was like, we were thinking like, oh, should there be an SD card? Because the pie board had an SD card. And I think he mentioned, what could we have an external flash chip, like some memory chip? And I was like, oh, yeah, we could do that. The flash chip, you see it between the main microcontroller and the USB port. These are only 30 cents, you know, and or, you know, 30 cents to a dollar. And it really changed how we interface with the software, because we wanted to make sure that, you know, that we had this board and we had all this hardware on it. We want to make sure that people could drag and drop files very easily, because the biggest challenge that we found with Arduino was people not understanding how to install the IDE. How, you know, this is where the circuit playground came from is his teacher saying, we have Chromebooks. There's no IDE at the time. There was no web based Arduino IDE. They were like, we want Neopixels. We want sensors, but we don't want any soldering. We don't want we want to be able to alligator clip stuff on. And so this is where the circuit. Let me even like break it down more for folks. So we were at a really big New York City has some of the biggest school systems in the country. We're in an event with teachers and they described what they wanted. They said, we want something under $20. It has to work on really old Windows. It might not have Internet sometimes. Oh, also Chromebooks. Also, we're using Python. We need to teach Python and it needs to have a bunch of sensors. And it also should have some type of block language. And like, yeah, we used to do some Arduino stuff, but we're moving to Python. So like, can you just do all that and like can be 20 bucks? And we're like, yeah. And so one other piece of this is Circuit Playground Express. In particular, you can do lots of different things with those. Today is about Circuit Python day, but could do Arduino, could do Maycode, can do Circuit Python, can do Russ, can do TinyGo. It really is. It really is like the universal. And it's a lovely chip to write your name on the back. I will say the Samdi 21, even with the Express, you know, it's it's at this point you can definitely run Circuit Python on it. It's great for beginners, but people will very quickly run out of memory. They'll find it, you know, a little limited. I don't think that's a problem. I think for a lot of beginners, you know, what we think of is like, OK, I want to do an advanced program with a Circuit Playground Express. You can always, of course, use Arduino or TinyGo or Rust, which are not nearly as memory intensive. But for a lot of beginners, you know, pressing a button, making a sound, shaking it in the LED sparkle. This is a really big step for them in learning electronics to have really just an if statement. I mean, it's it's massive to have someone learn an if statement. That's a it's a very core part of programming and procedural programming one step after the other. And the Circuit Playground Express can do that very well because there's so many, you know, things you can do. Press buttons and and there's audio input and there's a switch and there's accelerometer and LEDs and buttons and buzzers and sensors and capacitive touch. So this is kind of an all in one board. It doesn't have everything, but you can watch our Maker to Market series that we did with DigiKey. If you want to learn a little bit more of how I designed this and why I designed it this way, it was it's an offshoot of the flora and wanted to just try to cram as much stuff in there as possible. Yeah, so check that out here. And so that's the second most popular board. OK. And then third one. OK, so the Seed We Know Shout. This is a really popular board. I really love this this format. So I've used it in our cutie pie format. We added a little add on. But this is sort of like mini USBC. It's a little bit more pins than a trinket, but it's really tiny. And it's just got like 10 GPIO pins and power and it's got the little SMP pads. Really cute. I really like this. I like the tin on it. Well, I was going to say, so why does this one have a tin? Why do you think there's a tin on it? I think it's to protect, you know, protect it so you can, you know, put it into projects without having to worry about exposure. It's not an RF thing. You don't need that. There's no there's no RF. There's no Wi-Fi or radio on this chip. Again, this is a Samdi 21. This one, you know, again, you're going to be able to do some basic projects. Not super big, complicated ones, but you can get, you know, LEDs and touch and inputs and outputs and maybe like a small LCD display or something. And of course, these all all these boards went Arduino as well. So it's like you can have both. Only thing about this one is it doesn't have the external flash chip on it like the express boards do. So you only have about 30 K of memory. So it's not this won't be able to play audio clips or anything. You can make tones, but it can't store files. All right. So. Third most popular. And then rounding out just the somebody just kind of go through these. Yeah. So the Trinket M zero and the Feather. The Trinket M zero is actually kind of a predecessor to the shell. Again, it's it's got a couple of pans. It's small people like the Trinket. Originally, this was an 80 tiny 85 board, the original Trinket. But what's nice is that, you know, with a little bit of noodling, we fit a Samdi 21 E 18 on it. Again, doesn't have external flash memory, so it doesn't have a lot of space. But if you want something small and thin and cheap, you know, this will do the job. There's a little neopixel dot star on there. Regulator has, you know, five GPIO, including, you know, PWMs and analog inputs, you know, as like a little RGB, a little red LED and a green power LED and a reset button and mounting holes. So just a cutie just because the chat will always be a couple minutes different. Folks like the Infrared Circuit Python Library, great to was playing for the first time last night, amazing how much functionality fits into a tiny memory. Yeah, I mean, there's there is a lot of, you know, we work very hard to make. You know, yes, it is an interpret language. It's going to be 10 times slower. We think the benefits are worth it. But but more importantly, we know that chips are getting faster and better. You know, the the RP 20 40. Now the price is out a dollar a piece. It's it's much cheaper than the Samdi 21. We're not going to go and discontinue our existing boards. But you're going to see a lot more boards come out with better. You know, there's going to be a slow improvement in the capabilities of chips as the prices come down, the capabilities move up. You know, when we started the trinket, the original trinket, you know, what, eight years ago, it was an 80 tiny 85, like literally 256 bytes of RAM or something ridiculous. You know, but at the time it was like, oh, this is cool. It's it's so cheap. It's so easy to use. But then, you know, bumping that up to an RP 20 40. It's the same. The chip is the same price. It's about a dollar a piece. Let's let's go through. Yeah, let's keep going. So it's the next group we've got. So we'll do these four at a time. We've got the M four series. So you see the feather RP 20 40. It's just a feather form factor of the the RP 20 40. A great circuit python chip. The M four is is really one of my favorite chips. Tragically, it's it's been hit very hard by the silicon shortage. We're trying desperately to get chips. But just just so you know, it's it's one of the chips that, you know, we've booked many, many orders and they get keep pushed on the board tour. Anything with which chips M fours. Sandy, Sandy, 50 ones, the M four chips are and the NRF 52, 840 is a little bit. RP 20 40 does not seem to be affected in the ESP 32s. Don't seem to be affected by someone's plan on the board. Maybe double check the supply for those before you commit to the Sam. The Sam 21 is actually also quite hard to get. However, we use so many of them that we have like a year's worth of stack because we just go through so many that we we book many, many, many advance. So the the Sam B series was really hit hard. The Mac tag is interesting because this is our first, you know, it was it was an eight a box board with an ink display and an ESP 32 S2. And the ESP 32 S2 is the first expressive chip that is Wi-Fi because it's expressive specialty and native USB and that native USB because we really demand that our boards have a good workflow. We didn't want to. We actually used to support ESP 32 866 and we dropped that support because it's so hard to get files on and off the board that when the S2 came out, it's the same price as the ESP 32, yeah, but has USB. So we were able to do this cool ultra low power Wi-Fi display. This is one of my favorite boards. We still have this on our fridge. Yeah. So this this board, we've updated our circuit Python projects on it and our home fridges. We have the number of vaccination, vaccination. Vax in the U.S. And then we have the number as then we have the weather. Yeah, we have two of them. And it's like you just glance at it every day and it runs for months. It's great. As I knew, it's going to be a great, great weather day tomorrow. My fill or any. Yeah. The vaccinations are a little bit more encouraging than the covid tracker. Yeah. But for for the experience, if you're like, I really want a good powerful board, the feather M4 and the ESP 32 S2 and the RP 2040 are like top notch. The M4, I think is the fastest chip we have, like fully featured, fastest chip, even though technically, I think the ESP 32 S2 has higher megahertz because of the way it does the cash execution. I think the M4 is is really the fastest and that the teensy boards are technically faster, but we don't have full support for them. Yeah. OK, so we still have these. We do have a limit on them to our customer. And then one last thing on Mac tag. So if you have Wi-Fi, one of the challenges is like, well, I need to do I need a data service and I want to make sure like my privacy is respected and like the data service is not going to go down and needs to be easy and all that stuff. So that's why we have Adafruit IO free for most things you need. And if you need to plug it into something and any you can do anything you want on Adafruit IO, we don't lock it down to specific devices only for me to for what's next. OK, so at the Matrix portal, you know, this is a board that has an M4. Again, one of our favorite chips and then a ESP 32 is a coprocessor. And it lets you do. You can see when this was shot, this was during the time when people were wearing a lot of gloves back when covid was a thing. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Well, it's it's moved from hands to to Vax and Max and Mask. But this is what I what I thought would be neat is to make a board that makes it really, really easy to drive these RGB LED matrix displays. They're they're usually quite difficult to use, but having something that make it easy to plug Wi-Fi in. OK. And you check out some of the other. All right. So that's that board. All right. Next up. OK. So next up we've got so you see a lot of RP 2040 stuff filtering to the top. Arduino, they've got the nano RP 2040 connect. This one is neat because it's got the RP 2040 is a main chip. And again, an ESP 32 as a coprocessor. In fact, Arduino is who came up with the whole idea of having a coprocessor chip. They did such a good job that we we borrowed their code. We made a couple of changes to it. And then they also have tons of sensors on this. It's good for machine learning as well as doing Wi-Fi projects. And you can use this with Circuit Python and do the Wi-Fi and do the sensors. We've got everything working with it. What's neat is that it's interesting. This is a first Arduino board with the RP 2040 and it's got great Python and hardware support. Yeah. And what's neat is if you see a RP 2040. You know, Circuit Python is probably going to be running on it. Yeah, or at least can. OK. Next up. Funhouse, that was our last eight of box boards. It's designed for it's an ESP 32 S2 and we wanted to do something that was specifically for home automation projects. We're still hoping to get first class support in Home Assistant for this. But ESP 32 S2 is still not out of beta yet. Expressive likes to keep their chips in beta for quite a while. That said, it's it's got a pack full of sensors and Wi-Fi and a TFT display. So if you want to do home automation projects, sensor inputs and sending them to Adafruit IO, this board is is the place. I really like the ESP 32 S2 and I feel like we've really gotten significantly better with it and it's got a ton of sensors built in. I always like to have, you know, I like to have kind of two types of boards, either tons of stuff built in or like nothing built in. We also last year, this is the first NR 52 840 board. This is Bluetooth low energy, you know, the Nordic chipsets, ultra low power, capable and has BLE support. And we worked really hard to give Circuit, Circuit Python, really good native BLE, both peripheral and host support. So we can talk to peripherals and also act like a peripheral. And I think in our libraries, even like our libraries kind of work either way, you can just depending on how you initialize the the object, it can be one or the other. And another thing that I thought was, you know, we're doing more Bluetooth low energy and we've actually started adding Scott's working on Bluetooth low energy only workflow. So like what if you wanted to program boards that didn't have USB or maybe you just wanted to program them wirelessly? A lot of people have, you know, mobile phones as their only computational device. They don't have a laptop necessarily. Maybe they can't install software on the laptop or it's really locked down. But web Bluetooth, which is available in Chrome, Chrome OS and in Chrome browsers, could, you know, can transfer files, can interface with the REPL. So we've started that process. So it could be an interesting way to get devices that don't have native USB or we were thinking, you know, your smartwatches. They're often running an NRF 52 chip, but you don't necessarily have a USB port. So it's like, how do you install software? They're expecting you to use over the air only. So this would be over the air only programming for the folks have been following along on Pileep, which is our code editor for Circuit Python. You'll see that we started off with the Blueford Express as the board. Yeah, you know, it's like the Circuit Playground Express, but with Bluetooth. OK, but the QT pie, this is our kind of show like board. It's the same pinout. But what we really like about this board is that we have we put a STEMI QT connector on it, and so you can plug in all of our sensors and almost every sensor we have has I squared C that has I squared C has circuit Python support. So being able to plug. And you can also solder a chip on the bottom if you want more memory, but being able to plug in STEMI QT is is part of it. You know, many years ago, we talked to Chris Anderson, the good one. And he mentioned what he mentioned? You know, the future is from Earth Prime, Earth Prime is the evil one. OK, he's all right. Chris Anderson. And you said that we have to get to a point where we're not soldering. And so STEMI QT, which is also a quick or ZO format, you know, a lot of companies have been migrated to it. Of similar plug and play is part of it. If you can have plug and play software, plug and play hardware, it just takes a lot of time to, you know, get everything converted over and sort of naturally, you know, there's no open hardware commission. Where we it's like the IEEE, where we all agree on standards. We have a we have a system where the market is the standard pretty much. So, you know, feather becomes popular and then Spark funds like, OK, we're going to do thing plus it's a variant of feather, but it's it sticks to that standard. But we didn't all talk to each other and agree on it. We just sort of all looking for working out. I would say it would be great if everyone got together and we've tried. Like, but I actually think this is maybe a little bit more healthy because it means that it is, even if you don't have a seat at the table, you can come up with ideas and and just have it sort of like in a battle out in the market. So I'll say it is that that is that is one way. But we had talked to Arduino years and years ago. And we said, you know, the Arduino form factor is pretty big. Why don't we do something like this? And we showed the feather form factor and they decided not do it. And now their boards are gravitating towards that. In fact, when you see some of the new boards. So I think there's opportunities to work together. And I think at this point for the open source hardware folks that are out there, it's like, well, what are we all gravitating towards? It's like, well, there's a STEM, a quick type connector. There's yeah, standardized shapes. And this, you know, thankfully, we all agree on the same battery. I mean, like, I think that was a quick one that we all agreed on is the polarity and and pin out for lipo batteries, which we have on the feather boards and the circuit playground, Blue Fruit. So that's yeah, that's really good. All right. Yeah, I'm focusing on STEM and QT. Even breadboarding can be challenging when trying to get something running quickly. We use as much STEM and QT as I can in classes. Thanks so much for a strong commitment to this platform. Other folks. Yeah, just like across the board, they're they're using it in all the good and it's like I didn't invent, by the way, like I didn't invent, you know, the STEM and QT, quick format that came from Spark Fund, they did an excellent job. Just and I think it's cool that we, you know, we can look at each other and say, and I looked at it at first, I was like, I don't know, I feel about this. Like, you know, is this is a good idea that people want connectors or they want to solder it, you know, and then I sort of, you know, after I started playing with it a little bit, I was like, you know, what this has to be the future. As I was sort of experimenting with larger JST connectors like Grove, but I was quickly kind of won over. And I think I think that's a good thing. It means that the people who are using it, I think if you can get two or three companies to agree and their and their customers to agree on something, I think that's really healthy. It means that we're working together as a team, even though we're independently coming up with these ideas. And I think Circuit Python, you know, this is like, I'm talking about one thing. I'm talking about another thing. Circuit Python and Python hardware is the same. You know, there's there's some people who are like, I don't like Circuit Python, I like MicroPython. People like, I don't like MicroPython, I like Circuit Python. People like, I like, you know, Python 3, I like Python 2. But we're all agreeing on the same idea overall, which is we have to get away from the software getting too complicated and difficult to debug without having interpreted languages. Beginners cannot approach C or C plus plus is their first language. They have to have something interpreted. And so I think it's I think it's neat that Circuit Python is is so welcoming of all these different boards and all these different configurations. We take PRs all the time. People can, you know, get put into this system like here's Feather. Unexpected Maker has Feather's. Pymeroni has a bunch of boards. Yeah. You know, Arduino has boards. Actually, the other thing with Circuit Python, because we have HID support, you do keyboard stuff that allows products like the Kibo to get out there. They didn't have to develop all of that. I was, you know, some of the things I feel like I I learned a lot from Arduino. You know, I've been doing Arduino for 15 years. And so when we started drafting things like APIs and formats and interfaces and workflows for Circuit Python, I really I thought of all the things that really drove me kind of baddie with Arduino, like not having mass storage. I always wanted mass storage support, native mass storage support in Arduino. And it still doesn't. I mean, we have it in TV, USB, but it pretty much it doesn't exist as a first class capability. But HID does, you know, and I've always wanted ways to play like audio or to handle displays in the background to have error codes appear on on a display. Like all these little things that really either I really liked about Arduino, like I like the library manager in Arduino. So we came up with a bundle fly. I really liked. I like Cat Shapeboards. I like Cat Shapeboards. So that that's that's kind of where it came from. It's it's a little bit of an evolution. But also, we made some strict decisions along the way. And I think some of those strict decisions, although people would argue like, OK, you're being so strict about this, why are you acquiring USB native? Why can't why can't you just make it work with ESP 32? And the answer is we tried that and it just was terrible for everybody. And so let's go back to the top and we can. Yeah, so through some. Yeah, I wanted to show some of these just to show like this is and these are a lot of these are new. They've just been added. That's why, you know, you don't you don't see them hitting hitting up the truck by download or it just doesn't exist or something. So yes, I'm very popular. And so let's go. Let's keep going. We'll go through them pretty fast because we're still we're still rocking. We've got the Feather M0 Express QT Pi RP 2040. This was fun. You know, we did a couple RP 2040 boards and I really wanted one that had a semiconductor connector. So, you know, we got that. Happening that we are terminal from seed is kind of neat. It's sort of like a pie portal, but like all in one and has has a case and a display display support in Circuit Python is first class. You know, the repel appears on it. This is something that we when we develop the pie portal, that's when we which was our first display built in board. Scott was like, well, I really want to have the repel appear on the TFT. And actually, I have to admit, I was sort of like not convinced by that. I was like, well, is that is that useful? Why is that useful? But actually, once we had it, I'm like, oh, my God, this is really useful because if there's an error, it displays on the display on the TFT while you're debugging. You can see, you know, what's happening on the repel on the display. So you don't have to be tethered. Whereas with Arduino, you know, a lot of times if people are like, it's not working, I say, OK, plug it in and then open up the IDE and open up the serial monitor. But what if the serial monitor output appeared on the display? So I think, you know, having display native has been has been interesting. And it's really, really, really hard to do. Like it's a major lift. It's very challenging to have that native. So remember with MagTag, because ink, just like a parallel, ink was really hard to do on Arduino. And now you can just drag and drop images and you can get. Yeah, like doing, having it dither for you automatically. There's a lot of little things like the fonts management, these things that are so hard devices normally look terrible. They're very, whether they have to, you know, transform them and you have to convert them and you need like a co-processor. So we have a lot of, you know, I know people are like, display is a little bit weird. It's not the same as most because it's objects and it's object and layer oriented, not Rast oriented. You can do raster graphics, but it's like we did for the turtle demo, but it's it's different, but I think it's very powerful. And if you're doing user interfaces where you want updates and you want to have smooth animation, I think it's a worthwhile trade off. So the clue is also another board, micro bit shape, which is another eight box board that was that was designed. Yours ironic and we have some in stock, but believe me, this is this this board contains absolutely every single thing that you cannot get anymore. It's like it's like what chips are unavailable? All of these like nothing on here can be purchased right now. So I don't I don't even know. I think I probably have to redesign this board actually once we run out. I guess we could do an RP 2040 version or something. I did design but the sensors are what I can't get. Every sensor on there is there's a lot of SD sensors and they're all unavailable. It's really it's quite frustrating. You know, only the APDS, I think I can get the accelerometers and gyros are totally gone. All right. Well, you know, speaking of display and IOT and all the stuff that's hard. So by portal, I think it was when we release it and I think it still is. It's the lowest cost, easiest to use IOT display. It's just, yeah, it's designed for IOT. We made it so easy to do IOT price. We had a big burst of projects of like, OK, I just want to display something from the Internet and what's fascinating and do it with a nice font, right? And beautiful graphics and beautiful graphics. And this is so hard to do. And we know you want to do a structure interface. No problem. Yeah, I have to redesign this because again, I can't get the same 50 ones. We have a few in stock, but I'm going to redesign this to be, you know, ESP 32 is to only and it won't be as fast. But I think it'll be I think it'll be worth it. Also, you know, the S2 will come out. It'll be dual core and then we can do, you know, maybe Wi-Fi and graphics on one core and then main core for computation. And, you know, one thing that someone just mentioned in the chat is they said they appreciate the fact that Circuit Python can be put on my own custom non-commercial board. Support for new Circuit Python releases is automatic. That's right. As soon as you add it to here, which anyone can do, anytime there's updates with Circuit Python, you get it. And so, like, unexpected maker, Arturo and a few others, they've said publicly like, oh, every time there's a new Circuit Python release, I get new features. Yeah. And we're not we're never we're never going to acquire people to pay or do something, you know, financial or residual for getting boards included into Circuit Python. You do a PR. The only thing we require is a unique VAD PID. And the reason we do that is because we we do and have had detection based, you know, what board is is plugged in. And eventually, once we start doing more serious, like IDE tied for more update notification, knowing what board it is is very helpful. If people are all sharing the same VAD PID, we can't tell what hardware is attached because there's no other unique identifier. But, you know, we can get people VAD PIDs, RP2040 and Expressif. They do if you're using their chips, they'll grant you one. Microchip has a granting program and then the open PIDs also you can get one. So it hasn't stopped anybody. It's just you have to have a unique identifier, but that's it, you know, and that's those are free. So you can any board you want, even if you made one just for yourself, you made like a small run of DEF CON badges, do the PR and we'll get it in and it will be part of the release. You will forever have firmware available for you that is as up to date as possible. You'll get all bug fixes. You don't have to do your own builds for you. Here's here's here's a comment. So I'm trying to learn how to add Circuit Python to my custom 2040 board. I love how open Circuit Python is. That's right. We we've gone a completely different way because we saw hardware kind of closing, getting more close source. Like, oh, this isn't really open anymore. You have to use it with this idea. You have to start to see it. I mean, we're like, let's go the other way. Let's be more open than than than everyone else. You can't be included in this in this IDE. The IDE requires, you know, a licensing fee, which is fine. But we wanted to. Yeah, that's now covered. We just covered that style of electronics covered. What is it covered is having. Any IDE you want to use. Having the board file, that's another thing under open source. What I like about having just a CDC rappel and a text file on a file system is you can literally use any IDE. People are like, but I want my favorite. I'm like, you can use it. And they're like, but what about? Yep, it's fine. Anything that can save the file onto the file system, you know, ideally one that writes the entire file at once. We have a little fact section about it just because that makes it flushes to the file system. In case you unplug it, you don't want to accidentally frazzle it. But I think that. You know, I use Adam. I really like Adam because it has I have this nice plug in with the repel. Some people use VS code. I think Mu is a great beginner. I use Mu and now I'm getting back over to VS code because there's a lot of stuff for it and a lot of people use it. And it's hooked up to a lot of things that feels heavy to me. I like, I like Adam. It's, you know, I like something fast. You know, I still use XC Max, but Adam is for me. I think that, you know, my go. And what's neat is it. Yeah, any, any IDE you want to use. And some people don't even use ID. They use screen or Minicom and VI. And God bless. You can do that. Nothing stopping you. And so as we go through these, I wanted to also point out, like, so we have a screen thing, we have an eating thing, we have a Wi-Fi thing. We also have, if you wanted to develop a handheld game, there is a open source board out there and it happens to run in a circuit Python. And you can also run other things on it. I like it when our chips can run multiple, our boards can run multiple programming languages. So that, you know, the SAMD51 has excellent support in MakeCode Arcade. So you can, you can write arcade games in MakeCode and like, it's amazing. You can write games like this, you know, all drag and drop, super easy. And then, you know, I ported a Nintendo emulator to the chip as well. Yeah. So, you know, when you have a checkbox of like, well, I want a gaming thing. OK, well, I want, I want a costuming thing. No problem. I think this is like, I think one day we're going to look back and say, I also did such a one of the few boards. It's newly, it's circuit Python does not work very well with it because it doesn't support both eyes. Yeah. But you could use it if you want to. But, you know, it's such a unique board that we wanted to have for costuming. So you could still do stuff on it. And you can even split apart the eyes. Yeah. That's a neat feature of it is these these can come apart and then you can connect them with cables. Yeah. Kind of ridiculous that you did this for for an eight of blocks one year. We did this for an animal. Two years ago. Yeah. But I really we really wanted to do digital. We had we had done the Halloween and this is a monster. Oh, yeah. Once we this again, the Sam's 51 series, I love it. And one of the nice things is that they have a chip with 144 pins, which meant we can do finally a, you know, a mega shaped board with tons of GPIO pins and people. It's not the most popular, you know, board we have. But well, it's not a stock. Some people well, because it's really hard to get these chips. So, yeah, I think, you know, check out if DigiKey has them in stock. They might have a few. But the Grand Central, you know, just near infinite GPIO, right? So you're you're you're rocking out if you want to if you want something very fast that runs circuit Python very, very well has built in, you know, SD card and also just a little note. Todd but in the chat. Check out. Todd but maybe the link that's in Discord. Even the Fun House can be a really good game development platform. He's done some cool stuff with asteroids. Yeah, I mean, the the graphics management system and and tile map in in display. I know it's quite powerful. It's great for games. It's it's a little unusual if you've never programmed in it before because a lot of people who've done micro controller programming are used to rastering everything instead of treating things like objects. But the nice thing is you get flicker free animation, which you can't it's very hard to do in Arduino. And then, you know, we made a bigger version. This is, you know, Pipe Portal with a bigger screen. Yeah. And, you know, also out of stock because of the can't get I can't get the same ones. Can't get the what? Let's go back. Yeah. And. Also, I want to mention we have Neon Trelis. This is another interesting. I feel like we're we have this whole menagerie of boards. Yeah, this one, I just wanted one with like buttons, a little audio play thing with a four by eight. Yeah, made soundboards with it. Yeah, at the time we had to develop. We had a couple of developers who really into music and interfaces. It's like, well, what have you made a little handheld? It has an accelerometer and you can use that to like bend the the sounds like this is like a really interesting weird board. We have some stuff right now, too. We do. Some things are available. I think the the pie portal, the reason if we can't get screens, either, there's a screen short as well. So we've got a bunch of boards from Pimeroni. So, you know, historically, Pimeroni hasn't made a lot of development boards from microcontrollers. They've done like sensors and pie add-ons. But with the the RP 2040, you know, coming from Raspberry Pi, they've started doing a lot more microcontroller boards. And, you know, Circuit Python is great. You know, Pimeroni especially really likes, you know, arcade and keyboard type things are really into that stuff. And it's a really good match for Circuit Python because we've got native HID support, native keyboard support in Circuit Python. Team USB has made that possible possible. Thanks to TAC, our developer who, you know, started Team USB actually privately, you know, but like while working at Adafruit, I think, or maybe a little bit before. And so we've sort of brought Team USB as into Mainline Adafruit-supported open-source software. And it's, you know, what was amazing is, you know, after Scott got the first build of like, okay, I've got Circuit Python booted up and I've got like, you know, the USB CDC working, I went in and I turned on HID and compiled, you know, version with HID and I'm like, it just worked. And I, you know, turned on MIDI and it just worked. Having a shared USB stack that almost all of our boards use, not all of them, the SAMD 21 I think still uses its own stack because it's very tuned to its own thing. But the RP2040 uses Team USB, the SAMD 51 uses Team USB, NR52840 uses Team USB, the IMX boards also, it's a really keystone part of the Circuit Python experience to have this shared USB peripheral because USB is so hard and annoying to implement. And every single company historically has had their own USB stack that was licensed to only be used by their chipsets. And so you would like, you would get an ST board and they'd be like, here's the ST stack and it would say like, you could never use any of this with any other chip from ST. And so like you would, you have this ultra fragmentation of USB support, which really I think held back for more development. That's an example of, you know, we were talking about Stem and Quick, so we added that on the boards and a lot of people can do more. There was nothing that covered USB across multiple chips and now we have Team USB. Nobody had any incentive to do it. Yeah, it's like, why would you do all that work for all those other chips? Exactly, every company was like, we'll do basically 80% of the work and make sure that nobody else can use it. So what I'm trying to say is for the folks that, especially if you're chatty on like social media, we make a lot of decisions that aren't great for Adafruit but it's great for everyone out there in the community. And I think long-term it's good for Adafruit but supporting us by purchasing something once in a while will allow us to keep making a USB functionality across multiple processors. Yeah, like we did it. Yay, let's cover a couple more but then we'll bounce back because we're gonna run out of stuff. So yeah, I wanted to do that. I wanna also look at Blinka as well. You wanna look at Blinka? Yeah, so we have a lot of more boards. We have a couple SCM boards. As we get to here it becomes less popular but these are... I'll mention this. So we also have like another round. We wanna keep doing low cost, easy to use and we also have Trinkys. So there's a lot of Trinkys that are either in development or Trinkys that are available right now. And just to get ahead of it, like we're gonna have limited edition ones. We're calling them not forever Trinkys but it's nothing to do with NFTs. Yeah. Nothing to do with NFTs. There's limited edition Trinkys. So they're limited edition Trinkys. And so we wanna do stuff like that but then we also have these characters but we wanted to have something like fun. Like this just shows up as a drive and then you could do anything with it and it's like six bucks. Yeah. So, lots of fun. Okay. All right, what else do you wanna show? Nothing, I think a lot of these, as we're getting down here, a lot of these are like people doing individual, people's projects, people come up with their own private boards or like, you know, like say flowers doing synthesizers and you know, it's not a circuit python board that the synthesizer is a synthesizer that happens to be running circuit pythons. This is actually like a finished product that's being sold that runs circuit python which is neat. And so I like seeing that, I like seeing that circuit python can be a shipped product. It's reliable, it's dependable, it's usable. That was another thing in the early days of circuit python. When I started seeing artists use it, so they would put a display in something and they'd want it to do something on the internet and they started using circuit python. It's like, oh, if artists are doing it, just like artists picked up processing and then processing led to Arduino. Reminds me of that. It's like, oh, like you're adding more people that can do more stuff with technology. And then you want to talk about, I think since cats out of the bags, they say, our latest board was the Macro Pet RP2040. It was an Aida box and it is one of my favorites already. Yes, we have actually been making a lot of them but they've been selling out very fast. So this is one of the few things where we will be making more. So do sign up because we're gonna be making a whole batch of them next week. And if you got Aida box, then congratulations. It's a good idea to get Aida box. You already got one of these. You don't have to wait. One of the benefits of getting an Aida box is your guaranteed a box. Yeah. That's what we should call it, guaranteed a box. Guarantee a box. All right, how about we go to Blinka for a few minutes and then we'll... Yeah, so do check this out. This is, there's also an ebook reader. There's a lot of stuff and then satellites, of course, we could spend days on everything but the filters are your friends here. And it's one of the features. I think I might make a video later where it's like, what do you want? Arduino shield compatibility, battery charging Bluetooth, breadboard display, feather compatible, GPS, Lora, robotics, sotr-free speakers, STEM and like we had to make sure we were really concise with this because the topics can go forever. But then you see the list of all the makers and there's a lot of... Yeah, there's a lot of makers. So yeah, you know, if you do a PR into circuitpython.org, you know, get your build working and then submit a PR here, you can be featured as a maker. And this is some of the newest ones that we're just adding. Yeah. So you can sort by that as well. Okay, so Blinka is something that's a little different than... Well, there's still boards and that's why I thought it was, you know, I think it's worth... It's a little different though. It's worth talking about. So I will say these are not sorted by popularity because there's actually no real way for us. There's no, it's not a downloadable thing like here where you download a file. But Blinka is a compatibility layer for our circuitpython libraries that let you run it on, for the most part, either single board Linux computers or USB to GPIO type adapters. And the reason that this is interesting for me is, you know, we have a lot of people who use, yes, use my controller boards, but there's also like a, you know, half of the community uses single board Linux computers. And people want the same accelerometer to work with an Arduino or the microcontroller board or RP2040 or Pico as they do with a Beaglebone or Raspberry Pi. And I want, I really, really, really, really, really wanted to do and you can watch my, I think 2020 Linux Australia keynote talk. I go and I teach the entire history of microcontrollers and the reasoning behind this, really did not want to have a separate library that we'd have to maintain for circuitpython or micropython and native Python. It's just too much. It's just too much work to have to support. Reminds me of teeny USB. Why support? Why, if you do one thing and support all the chips. Yeah, because you have a bug in one and suddenly you have to back port it. It's a massive amount of work. And I'm already, we're already overwhelmed with the number of libraries that we maintain and manage. And we're happy to do it, but anything to make it easier. And so one of the things that when we were designing the APIs for hardware interfacing in circuitpython is at the same time, I was thinking very, very hard about how can I make sure that this will also be able to run on single board Linux computers like the Nano Pi or the Odroid or the Orange Pi or the Pines or Raspberry Pi or the Raspberry Pi 400 and the compute modules and all that good stuff. I'll just explain why there's the Pico's in here too because you're like, what's the Linux? Why is Pico there? So, you know, thankfully Blinka has really worked out. It's been very easy for us to, I know it's one of the, it has a little bit of that tragic like, oh, here's the standard, let's, we've, you know, the 18 standards, let's make a new one and now you're 19 standards. But all of the libraries, pretty much every single one of the libraries that we've written, you know, especially for iSquared C and GPIO and SPI devices works flawlessly on single board Linux computers or with devices like the FTDI, FT232H or MCP2221 or the, you know, the Pico, which can act as a USB to GPIO converter. You can put firmware on it to make it do that. And I think it's good because, you know, Python should be Python and one of the decisions we made with CircuitPython, which I think was a bit wise one, is requiring CircuitPython hardware API and code API that the libraries we use, the built-ins we use, the modules we use, to be a strict subset of Python 3. That's not true for MicroPython. There's a lot of things that MicroPython does that you couldn't copy and paste that code and have it run on a Linux computer or on a desktop. And our goal, and if you look at the, again, the Linux Australia talk that I did in 2020 is I have this little thing called, you know, I think it was like temperature sensor three ways, duck three ways. And I show, here's the same exact code, like literally copy and paste code running on a Windows computer, connecting to a sensor via FT232H on a Raspberry Pi Pico, wired up to the sensor running CircuitPython or a Raspberry Pi single board Linux computer connected to the GPIO. Same code running on all three platforms, the exact same output, this exact same experience, flawlessly. And I don't believe in right once run many, right? I think it's a bit of a lie, but I did want to minimize as much as possible the frustration of having Python feel different on CircuitPython boards versus single board Linux computers or desktop computers. And what's really neat is that for development, this is really fun because when I write CircuitPython libraries, I use one of these. I don't even connect it to, I write it on my desktop computer and I use this to connect to iSquad C because I know that if I can run it on CPython on my Windows machine, that same code, then I move it over to a SAMD 21 or 51 or Pico or Raspberry Pi, it just works. It's like very, very, very good. And it means that we're able to do more hardware because it's the software that takes so much effort. You learn once, have fun everywhere. I feel like that's the thing. It's like, once you start playing around with some of these things, your knowledge is portable, which isn't always true. With technology and certainly electronics. All right, well, let's see if there's any questions. Yeah, well, I was trying to knock them out before, you know, as they were coming in, but let me see if there's any, anyone can ask anything before we wrap up. I do wanna point out that we have a code. There's a code. I didn't tell anyone, I just wanted, this is just for people, I'm gonna turn it off in a few minutes. The code is board door. And you can use that for anything that's in stock, in the Adafruit store, which, you know, things could... It changes, it changes. We do have a lot of stuff in stock. I'll say that it's been an exciting challenge every day to get chips, but, you know, we're designing around it as much as possible, but we do have, you know, Pico's in stock, I think. Yeah. We have a max per three, max three per customer. I think we can remove that soon because we actually finally have enough. But we just put in a bunch of stuff right now. Check out all the, oh, I did wanna mention one thing with this pack. So the MacroPad, because it's hidden because it's like underneath the PCBs, you could see the silk card. Yeah. Has nothing to do with CircuitPython. I just wanna point that out. Okay. And so, let me just see if there's anything else that came in, and I think we're gonna be right on time. Okay, here we go. Any newer upcoming CircuitPython capable microcontrollers you're excited about or in stock ones you've recently discovered that look cool. I'm super excited for the ESP32S3 because it adds back, I believe it adds back Bluetooth though energy and it has dual core. And hopefully it's going to have almost identical implementation as the S2. And so that'll be like a powerful Wi-Fi and Bluetooth or energy capable board with native USB. I think it's gonna be really great Wi-Fi chip. I'm looking forward to getting this IMX boards I designed out, I was about to release it and then got hit with this massive shortage but I think those chips are finally available again. So we can make some IMX boards that are very powerful. It's fun to run CircuitPython at 500 megahertz because you're just like, it feels so snappy. It's a glimpse of the future. It's very enjoyable. I get obviously every chip is going to. Chips are only getting faster and faster. ESP32s are running at 240 megahertz. The SAMD51s are 120, the RP2040s are 133. So the chips are getting faster and faster. I don't have any other insights though. Those are the only chips that I know about. I would have really loved, the only chip that is like a fantasy chip for me is the SAMD71, which doesn't exist. It's a fantasy, but basically something that's a cross between IMX, RT 1060 capabilities but a SAMD51 peripheral set and ease of use. Like a lot more RAM running at 450 megahertz. Maybe something that can even run Linux a little bit. That would have been a great chip. It doesn't exist though. Only in my head. Also, folks were just mentioning this chat and I just put in there. The code won't end at five. I'll let it go a little bit longer. Yeah, yeah, we're just, yeah. Okay, but Diane, don't email us tomorrow when it doesn't work tomorrow. It's not gonna, we're not gonna leave on that one. PIO please on all future chips. Yeah, it's got like PIO. PIO is very cool. Is Waukey on your radar? It's really great. W-O-W-K-I. I have no idea what that is. I don't know if it's a chip. Hamlabs. USB host would be great. It's a request. Yeah, I think devices that have, it's some fandom thing. It's a wiki dedicated to cataloging the Warcraft universe. Okay. I don't think that's a Mac. I don't think CircuitPyron runs on it. I have one just because it comes up every like CircuitPython day. Yeah. Maybe someone like Sci-Fi doing a RISC-5. I think a RISC-5 chip would be cool. With USB. I would love to do a RISC-5. I think that would be neat, but right now there's just no good, there's no good chips at this time. Okay. All right. I think, well, things are moving forward. You might have to say that. Yeah, okay, maybe. All right, that is. All right, thanks everybody. It's cool. Everything, we're right on time. Thanks so much. Thanks for joining us. Today has been CircuitPython day. Thanks for joining us. We did the board tour. We'll be able to get this out to people who are like, I just want to see all the boards and like all the different things and why you did stuff and what is Blinka and all that. So that's why we want to do that today. And definitely check out the make board guide that Mac did with DigiQ together. And then check out circuitpython.org slash downloads, circuitpython.org of course, circuitpython.org. So it's Blinka and special thanks to everyone hanging out behind the scenes. And more, let's see, Mr. Certainly was in all the various sets. Thank you, Scott was over there. And I think a lot of our team was as well. We very much appreciate we were able to take a little bit of a break from the factory. We are going to go back to work now. Okay, thanks everybody. The next one up is 5 p.m. with Scott Deep Dive streaming in one hour. I wonder what it's gonna do. I have no idea. Talk about circuitpython. I mean, yes. All right, bye everybody. All right, bye.